


I Have Seen the Dark Universe Yawning

by fireflystorm, godhead (Widric)



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Alternate Universe - Cults, Animal Sacrifice, Body Horror, Dubious Consent, Dubious Morality, Horrorterrors - Freeform, Lovecraftian, Other, Pagan Gods, Purple Prose, Trickster Gods
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-10-17
Updated: 2015-10-17
Packaged: 2018-04-26 20:00:53
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Underage
Chapters: 2
Words: 4,261
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5018428
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/fireflystorm/pseuds/fireflystorm, https://archiveofourown.org/users/Widric/pseuds/godhead
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Dave knew the consequences of improper summonings: being sucked into the Void for the rest of his short life, or being thrust into an alternate dimension where his ancestors had come to the town wearing ceremonial garb and danced around stone circles, drinking spiced ale and sacrificing their fattest animals' most choice meat to their gods. Or worse – he could summon something far too powerful for any of them to control.</p><p>He felt that it might truly be the latter.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

The ominously-named Witch Lake, a small town in Michigan, brought to mind Lovecraft's descriptions of the town of Innsmouth. Every house was old and crumbling if not completely abandoned, the sky was permanently gray, and the entire town was framed by Witch Lake itself - a dark, murky body of water rumored to drag insolent children to their deaths. It is no surprise, of course, that Witch Lake had not let go of the magical, supernatural beliefs of the past.

It also came as little surprise that the popular religion of the town – if it could be called more than a cult – was something a particular young person was a somewhat unwitting part of.

☉

A child fell from the sky one day, landing in the charred ashes of what had once been a grocery store. He lay there, crying out, until Dirk Strider – hardly more than a child himself – lifted him in his own pale hands, and the wailing was replaced by silence. The child’s eyes were unnatural as his entry into Witch Lake; vibrant red, pale white eyelashes. Dirk nodded, pulled the child to his chest, and walked.

The building was ‘officially’ called abandoned, but there was no one who could say that with a straight face and a pure conscience. There his brothers and sisters waited; a stone structure whose walls were sometimes wet and cold, sometimes like leather, sometimes making sounds like the foundation itself was struggling to inhale its last. Before the group of pallid but bright-eyed individuals he offered forth the child, shrouded in black velvet, the one who fell from the sky. He was their gift, entrusted to Dirk, a young man named for a ritual dagger – and they named him David, the cunning and charming king.

But David did not grow up solemn and enlightened. He called himself Dave, wore sunglasses to hide his prized red eyes, and preferred to hang around on the internet rather than study the canonical texts. Not for lack of trying, of course – Dave’s childhood could easily be described as strange, and involving animal sacrifices. Dirk, being the most powerful member of the group now that he was tasked to care for the Chosen, tried to reemphasize the role of the supernatural in his brother’s life. He frequently came home with bloodied hands and a new text written in script only decipherable to Dave.

To his credit, he was frightfully good at reading the language of the Horrorterrors – or rather, he had the capability to understand the Broodfester Tongues. He understood how important it was, and unquestioningly believed what he had been brought up to believe; still, he wished that the rest of the children his age wouldn’t look at him with a combination of fear and reverence. There were, however, two other children that seemed strangely attached to him. Dirk called them the Harleys or the Englishes, grandchildren of a couple who stood out as worshippers of a different belief. Dirk refused to tell him anything more, so Dave had been forced to pick most of it up from Jade and Jake themselves.

“Benevolent, but unpredictable,” Jade had said once, her green eyes trained on the sky, her voice lost in thought. “He speaks to Granddad through the winds, you know.” Jake nodded as well, a hint of a smile on both of their faces.

Dave had studied them, wondering why the others kept away from them when they looked so different from him – dark skin, dark and wild hair, perpetual matching grins. If it was the way that he looked that let the others know who he was, then how could they fear Jade and Jake the same?

His question was answered when Jade reached out to touch his elbow and a shock like a thousand volts ran through his body, forcing him to jump back and hiss a curse through his teeth.

“Dave?” she had asked, worried, frozen in place. Dave had seen her wince, too, but she clutched her own hand instead of shouting out. “Are you okay?”

“Yeah,” he had replied, “did you feel that, too?”

The two cousins shared a look. “Yeah. We don’t know what it is. Sometimes it happens with other people, too.”

Strangely, her words gave him a sense of relief. He was tired of being isolated because he was different, somehow. If the Harleys were different, _more_ different, he could deal with that.

☉

The three of them went from middle school to high school, sharing the same classes; Witch Lake was still far too small to have many classes offered. Overall, not much had changed: Jade still doodled nuclear reactors and irradiated animals during Religion class (she had never paid attention, and Dave sometimes wondered whether she even knew about the things that went on in town); Jake still had terrible taste in movies; Dave was still summoned to the Meeting Place in the middle of class to perform ritual sacrifices and incant prayers in a language which most peoples’ clunky human tongues stumbled over.

On a particular day in a particular month, however, he had taken the entire day off. He walked towards the Meeting Place near the lake, heart pounding. The water glistened in the morning sun. His feeling was less excitement about the ceremony and more terror for what could happen. Dave knew the consequences of improper summonings: being sucked into the Void for the rest of his short life, or being thrust into an alternate dimension where his ancestors had come to the town wearing ceremonial garb and danced around blood circles, drinking spiced ale and sacrificing the fattest animals. Or worse – he could summon something far too powerful for any of them to control.

With the dagger and its embedded, pulsing jewels he pricked each fingertip and placed them down, bleeding, into the circle. Everyone’s eyes were trailed on him: the Elders, with their sagging skin and tired eyes, who still answered to Dirk; the pallid youth whose faces and eyes bore the slightest hint of dread, and expectation. Would he open a communication conduit? Would he summon a Being? As his fingertips touched the floor, the candled flickered out instantly and he tried to stay focused, breathing steadily and drawing the sigil in his own blood.

When it was drawn he waited half a second, hardly any longer, before the brilliant white-black light lit the floor from the center, a perfectly straight column that seemed to stretch towards the ceiling infinitely but never reached it. Smoke or fog blacker than the Void itself bloomed from the center, pulsating and growing, its tendrils seeking out the nearest living flesh, touching his chest, crawling through his skin and wrapping around his beating heart. The black bloomed like a terrible, terrible rose from whence a million brilliant lavender eyes glared out at him, and the whispers of static grew so loud they might make his blood vessels burst.

Then She unfolded herself, the great Goddess, with Her splayed tendrils and billions of eyes, running down skin that was gray white black and moving, crawling, like static on a television screen or so many horrified beetles. The most powerful Lesser Goddess in the cosmos, patron saint of the Cult of Fluthlu, Conduit to the Elder Gods … stared at him, waiting.

“I’m,” he began, “I’m Dave – I—“

Her skin swirled, and a few of Her eyes winked closed, almost as if She were in deep contemplation, or trying to appear more humanlike. The room was a vacuum, silent and breathless, as the youth had fled and only the Elders and Dirk stood behind him. Dave could feel their eyes, no longer concerned with him, only concerned with the beautiful, horrible thing that he had done. He felt the end of his life approaching. He was only meant to create a gateway, a conduit to Her – but he had never seen anything like her, indescribable and measurable only with alien geometry that couldn’t possibly be understood in the context of the room they were stood in, which seemed to stretch and bend to accommodate Her.

He heard a smack as the Elders and Dirk dropped to kowtow to her, and yet he stood paralyzed; the Goddess mesmerized him, held him captive without a touch.

“Goddess,” he whispered.

She did something, then, that sounded like nails on a chalkboard and the sound and color of magnesium alighting, the hiss of static and something heavy and hard drilling into his brain. He realized she was laughing, and the sound made his teeth rattle. And then sound, which his brain translated with no prompting, a language for which he had a penchant but could not possibly pronounce.

< _Well?_ >

Finally prompted, the prepared speech flowed from him, his tongue wrapping itself around alien syllables with no hesitation. “Lesser Goddess, Conduit to the Elder Gods, we worship you only. If a human life has inherent worth, I am dedicated to you …”

Something grabbed him, invisible but holding tight, clutching his body.

< _Dedicated?_ >

Dave’s breath was quickened and shallowed as he continued, “I am wholly dedicated to you as your servant. Henceforth you shall be our Goddess, we bow to you and offer you sacrifice so that we may aid you and so that you may aid us.”

There were so many eyes. His breath was held, fists clenched as he waited. There was laughter, eternal and eerie and painful, predatory and threatening, and it was followed by the silence of the vacuum. Her figure stretched on for eons, but the room was only forty feet wide; She filled all of the space, but only some of it.

< _Very well. Humans are miniscule, pathetic things, but it is within my discretion to assist you during your short, quaint lifespans. And when the Pale One – the Servant – has died, I will destroy all the things I have given you._ >

There was a roar, a strong wind and heat which came from Her then. It was so loud, nearly deafening; outside of it, all he heard was the weeping and shouting of the Elders. “He is the Chosen! He is the Sanctified! The Pact is sealed!” The black-dark light was blinding, and he felt that the wind and sound might kill him if the Goddess did not. Her grip loosened around him, and he stumbled backward, propped up only by his elbows.

< _When I am needed, send the Pale One for me. He will serve my ransom._ >

The Goddess collapsed on Herself like a dying star. The noise was deafening, and the candles, paintings and other adornments on the walls came clattering off, breaking or rolling away, as if all of reality wanted to escape Her awful, terrible reality. And just as quickly as She had come, the room went silent and dark, the only light filtering in gray from two small, dirty windows. There was a long stretch of time where the only sound was human breath.

Then, there was running. Footsteps on the concrete, and then everyone speaking all at once. Lauding Dave, grabbing his hair and arms and legs, weeping into his shirt. His senses all at once stung and went numb, and he allowed them to do with him what they would. There was talk of feasting, and sacrifices, but he could not find an appetite.


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> TW: emetophobia

They looked at Dave now like he was the Messiah, and he supposed in a strange way that he was. But he could only escape their prodding stares in the middle of the night, in his dark and pointless dreams. He resented that, in a way – it made him even more of a stranger to Witch Lake than he had already been. But the night, otherwise, was no different than always, outside of his thoughts of vague discomfort. He slowly drifted into a sleep.

For the first time in a long time, there was a dream. Black as the darkest of nights, the Void stretched on for an eternity into the distance. And then he saw Her before him, just as he had seen Her before him on that day. Unsummoned into his dreams, he felt the same terror, amplified. Was this the end, now?

“Hello,” She spoke. Not in that alien language, but his own. There She was, perched awkwardly on an armchair floating on top of pure nothingness, tendrils made of Void itself folded over one another, a terrific smile on Her face. Her skin blurred and buzzed, now more pale than gray and black, like the finest porcelain. But She was not fragile. It was like seeing a well-baited trap; a Goddess who could make herself look human, like a siren luring men to their deaths.

“This is a dream,” he whispered to himself.

The Goddess nodded, Her Cheshire smile curving along Her black lips. With a start, Dave realized that her tendrils, made of fear and smoke and things he could never understand, had begun wrapping themselves around his ankles.

“Why?” he asked, only mild terror coloring his voice.

“You are _mine_ ,” She spoke, standing now – but he had not seen Her get up. She was close, dangerously close, radiating cold heat, Her face only inches from his. “My Servant, my Sacrifice.”

The darkness wrapped around his legs, his midsection. Cold, smooth, and slimy, like so many massive, horrific slugs. Every part of his body – even the parts he wouldn’t admit to – were squeezed tightly by an unseen force.

“You’re mine, aren’t you?” She pressed, her hands cupping his face. “Don’t be stubborn.”

Dave suddenly felt his heart deflate, as though someone had punctured it with a needle and all the blood had poured out. It occurred to him, then, how defenseless and alone he was in the world. Was he worth the trouble? The dedication? This was what he had been raised to do, and yet he still held that in his stomach as a smooth rock that kept him from sleeping at night.

“Aren’t you mine?”

His lips formed words that never once entered the sphere of thought; they were automatic, breathless. “I am yours.”

She grinned, predatory, terrifying. The most horrible creature, indescribable and inhuman even in a form that could be recognized as humanoid, deep within the Uncanny Valley. The darkness penetrated him – every part of his body, every nook and cranny, even beneath his skin and into his organs, and wrapped around his beating heart until all he could feel was the panicked thumping.

He awoke covered in sweat. He felt like he could hardly breathe. Surely he was in too deep.

☉

 

Dave kicked a rock into what he affectionately referred to as Blood Pond, in the middle of Fuck Gulf. It always seemed like there was something adrift in the water, from trash to turtles and driftwood, and the sky always was dark pinkish gray around that area. He felt like his head was just as cloudy as the sky, his body just as polluted as the water.  
  
In truth, he hadn't been feeling well for a few weeks. Or a few months. He felt a deep pit in his stomach that never left him, and from the corners of his eyes he felt like he saw everyone in town staring at him (Jade called him a celebrity). It was because of the dreams. Every night since that first time he saw Her; every night She visited, pawing at him like a cat with a toy just before the pounce. Ten thousand eyes, blinking, squirming, rolling. Roiling, bloodshot, creeping skin covering her unnatural face, her universe-bleached smile. And She spoke to him so often, in words he didn't remember when he awoke.  
  
It wasn't Her visits that bothered him. It was that he couldn't remember what She had said.

Dave couldn't recall if the first time She had visited had been a dream or not. The opposite of a power fantasy, maybe. He wouldn't put it past himself. But since he'd been feeling ill -- and any illness was a chance to sucker Dirk into letting him stay home -- he'd had a lot of time to think, and there was never much else to think about except for the Goddess to which his whole life was devoted.

"Hey," a voice called out through the windless, heavy air. "Dave, ol' pal!"

The teenager turned around to see Jake running enthusiastically towards him, waving a few bound pieces of paper. The whole "old port town" aesthetic was cool, but that did seem like a little bit of overkill.

"So I know you and I really love my nanna's old stuff," he panted as he offered the papers to Dave. "And I think that I may have very well hit the motherlode this time 'round. Are you ready for this?"

"Dude, is this a fucking diary page?" He scanned over the first paper, which very clearly in loopy handwriting read 'journal' at the top. The bespectacled boy leaned halfway over Dave's shoulder, pointing one dirty finger at the words on the page.

"Yes, yes, but look -- it said she buried a time capsule for Jade to dig up and I think we should go have a look-see. What could it hurt, anyway? Maybe we'll finally find something of my old nanna's that's worth a fortune, huh?"

The blonde boy turned his mouth, then sighed. He couldn't deny Jake yet again at this point -- he'd been using illness as an excuse for weeks and had only hung out with his friends maybe twice. With all of the religious rituals and contemplation time, he barely had time for his nearly-nonexistent social life. Maybe for someone even less social it wouldn't have been a problem. Regardless, he nodded. "Sure, let's go dig up your grampa's garden I guess."

☉

"Are you serious?"

Dave held the box aloft as he spoke, just blonde enough to be a caricature of Link. Except it wasn't dangerous to go alone, and a beaten-up steel box containing approximately too many pieces of paper and only one interesting statue was not something anyone would recommending taking on a harrowing journey of heroism. Jade and Jake grasped at the papers, each taking about half to paw through. Dave stood in front of either of them, holding the box with the carving inside, which seemed to stare at him with creepy little eyes. It was just an amorphous figure with a little slot at the back and two holes punched where he assumed the 'face' would be.

"Seems to be a lot of paperwork, eh?" Jake offered in his usual good-natured way as his cousin pored over the documents. "Maybe it's medical records. What do you think nanna would have wanted us to have these for, Jade?"

Jade looked up with unnervingly bright eyes, an expression like wonder on her face. "These aren't medical records, Jake -- give me that!" She snatched away the remaining papers from his thin brown hands. "It's all kinds of cool stuff about the garden. Gardening techniques. And some of her drawings!"

"Okay, what about this fucking turnip thing?" Dave asked, reaching for the statue. He grasped it and then immediately dropped it as a white hot shock went up his arm, making him wince before Jake reached over for it, catching it expertly before it hit the ground.

Jade made a clicking sound with her tongue as she scanned over the papers, flipping through a few. The yellowed paper made a crisp sound; one of the few things that had managed to stay dry in the humid town, probably due to being buried so deeply under the well-tended dirt. "Well, there's a diagram here that shows something sorta similar -- except it had a little more shape. See? Maybe that's what it was before it got weathered down."

The diagram was a rabbitlike creature, with longer forelimbs and more exaggerated hindlimbs, two beady holes for eyes and a slot on the back. There were drawings of herbs and arrows directing them to the eyes and slot. Dave narrowed his eyes behind his shades and scrunched up his nose for a second. Jade seemed to watch him with anticipation, just before he inhaled and then let out a strong sneeze that blew the papers out of her limp grasp.

"Dave!"

"Sorry," Dave answered, exaggeratedly wiping his nose, "I'm allergic to bullshit." Still, the sneeze was real, and the statue (which Jake held close to his heart, though the eyes still seemed to face Dave) gave him the creeps. It was the sort of creep that ran straight down his spine like electricity, like when he first heard the Goddess speak in Broodfester Tongues. He could have sworn he heard laughing. Were it not for Jake interrupting, he would have broken into a cold sweat.

"So what's the little guy for, then?" Jake grinned in his toothy fashion and turned the statue to look eye-to-eye at it. "What secrets do you have for me? Make like I’m Indiana Jones and you're the Temple of Doom."

"I dunno. I guess it's a good luck charm," Jade said with a shrug, motioning at the illegible label on the diagram.

The sky seemed to have darkened considerably in the time they had been having their conversation. It looked like any minute the floodgates would open and they'd be washed straight down into the hole they had dug to get to the time capsule. Dave checked the time on his phone, which had just started to lose reception.

"Well, I've gotta go, but it was pretty cool to dig up some old granny's paperwork and plants," he said as he started to walk.

"Wait! Take it with you." Jake offered the little totem.

Dave hesitated, then met the friendly green eyes and there wasn't really any opening to refuse. He wrapped his hand around it, then rigidly marched himself back home, not looking back even once. He felt the cold sting of rain as he walked, and was half-damp by the time he'd trekked back. He dropped the carving unceremoniously down onto the kitchen table and shook the weird feeling from his hand, then went back up to his room for a nap.

☉

Dave's ears were buzzing. Loud, like he had just stumbled into a colony of angry bees. He had to make an effort to pry his eyes open and he recognized the place, because he saw it every time he dreamed -- a void, blacker than black, and a lavender chair with a Goddess seated upon it. Sometimes She appeared more human, with grey skin and clear purple-black eyes; this time, however, She looked more freakish than ever. Her form was huge, unfathomably huge, covering the chair a hundred times over with writhing masses of limbs and tentacles and unrecognizable pieces of flesh that he could only tell were attached because of their vague, jerky movements. Eyes, so many eyes, everywhere. Rolling, exposing their veins, or staring at him and blinking unevenly. The static was so loud he couldn't hear his own thoughts.

< _Impure._ >

The language of the Old Ones seemed to swirl around him, cutting through him like a cold wind. And yet, there was a slight relief -- he understood Her.

< _You have become Impure_.  >

Dave felt his face blanch. He tried to move but he was bound, silent and still, like his tongue had been clipped out. Tentacles wrapped around his body, not tightly, not even touching him, like a fucked up coccoon. There were beaks and hands and suckers everywhere, and he couldn't see the void any more, just a face an inch from his own with twenty purple-black eyes and a Cheshire grimace cut into it like a tear in fabric.

< _Let me purify you._ >

He felt his head lolling, his tongue returned to him, his body and knees weak. What point was there to fighting, anyway? This was what he was born for. He was the prophet, the messiah, the Chosen. His life was devoted to Her, his Queen, the Lesser Goddess. It was the purpose for his existence and there wasn't any point to fighting that.

"Yes," he answered, almost pleading, and then his mouth was filled with some sort of tendril that tasted black and starry and his eyes were filled his nose was filled he was drowning, he was gone, he was dead.

With a start he woke up, shirt and sheets soaked in sweat, and nearly fell as he scrambled to get untangled from his sheets. He stumbled as he ran towards the bathroom, stomach in revolt until his hands were around porcelain and he vomited a thick white sludge that sank to the bottom of the water. His eyes stung and burned, tears streaming from them as he spat the last thick, disgusting tendrils of slime mixed with saliva out into the toilet, and unceremoniously he whacked the plunger until the water washed away the impurity of his soul.

He was certain he’d sat strewn over the toilet for at least a half hour before his knees were no longer shaking and he felt he could stand. Like a man wandering the desert, gone sun-mad, he stumbled down the stairs, propping his entire body weight on the railing. His vision went bad as he made it into the kitchen; it seemed like the walls were slowly breathing like some great, horrible animal, and he could only just make out the shape of the kitchen table as his body collapsed halfway onto it, and with a great clatter the ceremonial dagger and the amorphic turnip-figure, as well as the table itself, all crashed to the floor.


End file.
